As you’d expect from a project that was so tightly framed, there are some rough edges to the completed work, but these are not so jarring as the ones that spoiled my enjoyment of How to be the Luckiest Person Alive. This book may have been churned out in about a week, but in that week a designer and an editor were working hard on adding value to the collection of essays gleaned from the blog.

The main rough edge issues are repitition of some sections and also many of the essays were in response to emailed questions or previous discussions and they have not been properly re-framed to take that into account. It’s not hard to see where this is the case and backfill a little yourself, but does leave you feeling that one more week of editing could have made a big difference.(more…)

I have been an avid reader of his blog for some time now. He is prolific, occasionally produces profoundly insightful gems and has pushed the line so far out on how much honesty one can put into bloging it is amazing. There are a great many blogs by and for wannabe entrepreneurs out there, the ones that standout are not those that claim to purvey fullproof get-rich methods so much as those that discuss their failures as openly as they discuss their successes. James’ blog is stunning in his discussions about and deep honesty in portraying his failings, and yet he is a slightly socially reclusive geek who has made the occasional multi-million dollar success. The journeys from crashed out, penniless failures back to success and happiness, by following his Daily Practice , are entertaining rides indeed.

Recently a great deal of books I have purchased and read have been on the back of first following the author’s blog. Indeed most of them are collections of work that had previously been published on said blogs and this is part of a growing trend in micro publishing which I am fairly certain sounds the death knell for traditional big house publishers who should be radically altering their model if they hope to survive.

Unsurprisingly, these projects have produced a fairly mixed bag of results, from the hastily and poorly constructed gathering of old posts with little thought to structure to the hastily but rather better constructed and themed gathering of old posts to a demonstration of the state of the art for this kind of project.